senile1

Yes, I do. The one in the picture below was built a couple of miles back in a Missouri Department of Conservation area. Very few people hike back to it as it requires scaling some steep hills with your equipment to get there. The paths aren't exactly the best either.

Paul explains the use of horizontal retrieves in his long post above. I assume this applies to these videos as well. See below.

Where I live in Kansas City we were supposed to have a bit over a minute of totality. I stopped work and went out to watch. Just as it was reaching totality, the clouds came in and then some rain. The clouds haven't left. Unfortunately, I am now blind.

@Team9nine nailed some of the best resources for learning about the habits and movements of bass. A number of others have mentioned time on the water and @scaleface makes an excellent point about how much time may be needed. I think many of us often go to these resources and study the information but we don't realize what it takes to apply it on the water. How many of us have studied these guides, reviewed and chosen some likely looking places on a map of a large lake, and then proceeded to those areas and fished them only somewhat differently than we have in the past? I know I have. An angler may think he has discovered one of the best large points available on a lake, but he won't know the full picture of how bass use it until he has researched that piece of structure on the water and in different seasons. Don't shortchange the mapping of structure just because you have the best electronics available. Use those electronics to help decrease the time needed, but make sure you spend enough time to cover the whole area. Those tiny "spots within a spot" that hold lots of bass typically aren't found by accident.

I hope you had a good birthday, @A-Jay. I turn 28.5 years old in November.

Thanks for the support, everyone. That is sad and quite an obstacle to face. My thoughts are with you and your wife. Thanks, Sam. I actually did quite a bit of reading once I discovered Dad had the disease. I also did a lot of research on the financial requirements and the ins and outs of using Medicaid in Missouri. My parents have very little and this was the only way they were going to pay for his nursing home care while leaving something for my Mom to live on.

I've been away from the forums for the most part for the last 7 months and I'm not sure if I am back now. It is kind of hard to get back in the groove with posting when more important things are going down. I plan to try and be a part of things around here but only time will tell. My Dad is now 79 years old. We discovered in a startling way around Christmas that he was afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease. We were leaving his home, and he decided he and my Mother were leaving too, because to him, it wasn't his house. I had to drive him around for a while and humor him until he recovered and then we returned to the house. I thought I had detected some minor signs before, but since I live 7 hours away and our Mom wasn't telling my sisters and me everything that was occurring, we really didn't know how bad it was getting. By the end of January, he was placed in a nursing home because he was a roamer and my Mom could not control him. Two months ago he fell at the nursing home and broke his hip. Fortunately, he seems to be recovering well from that. He knows us most of the time but he is living in a different time quite often and thinks he is still working on the farm. Between traveling to see him and assist my Mom with financial issues, my work as a network engineer, and making time for my wife, children, and grandchildren, it has been difficult to find time for fishing. Below is the last picture I have of Dad on the water in 2016. I know I am not the only one to deal with this, but I wanted to let everyone know why I have not been around.

Classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian or respondent conditioning) refers to a learning procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus (e.g. food) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (e.g. a bell) Instead of getting hung up on semantics, lets lay that baby to rest. As Team9nine stated, conditioning is a type of learning, by definition. And even simple-minded creatures become conditioned.

This explains it better. The first recognition of someone doing this with the word, fish, was in 1855. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

I think there are only two. This is just a guess but I suspect that 99 percent of the time any woman who allows you to fish 200 days a year looks like Igor and has a hump on her back.

My, my . . . . a 12 lb upgrade on his personal best. That's heart attack city right there! Very nice fish!

Nice! Congratulations on the new PB.

Those are some nice looking fish!

Congratulations!

I use green pumpkin, black/blue, and to a lesser extent reddish and brown/orange colors. If you are trying to match colors and species, they vary across the United States so you need to do research for your region or state. In Missouri, we have at least 35 crayfish species and 7 are found nowhere else (https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/general-species-information/aquatic-invertebrate-facts/crayfish-facts). The top photo, below, is a typical white river longpincered crayfish (Table Rock, Bull Shoals lakes). The bottom photo is a Devil Crayfish and it is common all across Missouri. However, in the bootheel region some of these crayfish are a blue color and I have seen other pictures of them where they were a green color with red on the pincers.

Now that's a fish! Congratulations on your DD!

I was rooting for the Cubs. Like K_Mac I am a Cardinals fan but after 108 years you have to feel some empathy for Cubs fans. I'm glad they got this out of the way so that I can go back to rooting against them. Now for the Indians . . . . 1948 is quite a long time to go without a World Series victory. I hope it comes for them too.

Congratulations on the new PB.

That's an amazing grouping of big fish, Shimmy! You are on it.

That's a nice looking fish! Sounds like a great trip.

That's a nice group of healthy fish. That largemouth appears to have plentiful forage. I hope it doesn't die of obesity before it reaches trophy size.

That's a very sad thing to hear . . . . especially so with the unexpected nature of it. My thoughts go out to you and your family.

Very nice bass!

Very nice fish! That was my first impression too but looking at the young man's hand compared to the mouth makes me wonder if it could be a 4 lb'er. This is a case of needing to know the size of the individual holding the fish.

I'm in Northwest Missouri and the toughest time of the year for me is in the dead of winter. Surface temperatures typically get down to just above freezing when the water isn't hard. If you can find them and wait for a bite window you can catch some, but those windows are short and you have to be out there in the cold to hit one. The summer transition into fall can be tough at times, but if I stay out long enough I usually figure them out and have a decent day on the water.